In The Beginning…. And Then…

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. He created the birds of the air and the fish of the sea and the beasts of the land. And then he created man, and it was down hill from there on out….

Forgive me that this is not an exact quote from any bible but for the purpose of this post you get the idea where I am going.

The very first family that God made ended up with a murderer. One brother killing another. That wasn’t a very good start to humanity. It seems that the seven deadly sins were created at the very beginning.

A few generations down the line God threw up his hands and decided to start over again. Not with everything, just with people. He was determined to get it right this time but it is obvious he didn’t make much of an improvement the second time around either. I know all the theologians can give thousands of reasons for it that don’t challenge the idea of God’s perfection. They have honed that skill through a couple of millennia. If you work on something long enough you will eventually cam come up with enough excuses to rationalize almost anything you want. I’m talking about the theologians here not God.

It kind of make me wander, if things were so perfect before man came along and he is made in the image of God just what kind of shape is God himself in? Now before any of you start flaming me I am saying this in 90% jest. And then there is the other 10%.. 😉

To keep things in perspective I take the bible as a collection of stories about man’s relationship with God. The absolute truth thing came much later by human theologians. That keeps me from having to make up excuses for God and how his creation turned out. I kind of think that God did get all this started in some fashion but then he left it up to us to carry on from there.

Another aspect of the bible being stories is that it is kind of like “Downton Abbey” which was such a hit on PBS recently. It was about British Aristocracy and the distinct divide between the ruling class and everyone else. The story line was fascinating but anyone who know much about it realizes that it showed almost exclusively the fairy tale side of British life in those years. The bible is kind of like that, it tells the good side for the most part but eventually some of the bad stuff shows up to confuse things.